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Description
The idea of the project came from the shared motivation of two university workplaces to establish cross-border learning community of university students and academic staff, where participants will try to implement philosophy and practice of sustainable development and social responsible behaviour into curricula and daily life of vocational education institutions in the Czech Republic and Norway.
The target group of the project are current university students of pedagogy study field, later they become teachers of vocational subjects within agricultural or other related sector. The other target group are academic staff from Norwegian and Czech universities of life sciences. These teachers train future VET teachers in didactics, social pedagogy, environmental and intercultural education. Their main role in the project will be preparing teaching materials for two international training courses, teaching and coaching future VET teachers at both courses and sharing or exchanging good practices in terms of approaches of social responsibility and sustainable development.
The first two-week international course will run in Norway and the second in the Czech republic. At each course, future VET teachers and academic staff from partner institutions will learn and work together. The main aim of the course is to conduct several team teaching units at vocational schools. The intensive courses would bring a great opportunity to acquire innovative didactic methods and forms, to get familiar with examples of good practices in terms of sustainable and socially responsible approach in vocational education and to develop didactic and pedagogic competences in an international environment.
The project activities should also strengthen the partnership between the Czech training institute and the Norwegian university.
Summary of project results
The main idea of the project is based on the shared motivation of the Norwegian and Czech university workplaces, focused on pedagogy and didactics, to create an international community students and academic staff in which participants develop teamwork skills and acquire the philosophy, principles and practice of sustainable development and socially responsible behaviour in vocational education. The main outputs of the project were two international educational activities - a summer school in Norway and an international course in the Czech Republic for future teachers of secondary vocational schools. During the 2-week internships, the incoming students integrated among the students of the host university and worked on assigned tasks in smaller international teams. Thus, they gained new knowledge about the education system of the partner country, got acquainted with examples of best practices of sustainable development and social responsibility in vocational education, developed their didactic and pedagogical skills in an international environment, strengthened communication skills in English, teamwork, social and other soft skills. The activities took place not only in the classrooms at partner universities, but also in non-traditional places, such as the greenhouses in the campus of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, in the stables in Velká Chuchle, in the Mostecká Basin, in the Solvay Quarries, in the surroundings of the Norwegian lake Gjende or in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park or the Norwegian Jotunheimen National Park. A core part of the mobility was the preparation and implementation of team teaching at secondary schools in Litvínov and As. The future VET teachers used practical demonstrations and didactic games to introduce all 17 European Sustainable Development Goals to secondary school pupils. Look, touch, explore, create, think - these are just some expressions for the activities that the participants were able to try out. Walking around the lake, climbing the nearby peaks or getting to know typical rocks, plants and animals all played a role. Through discovering nature, both students and academic staff gained essential life experiences: personal experiences, sharing them with others and realizing their common place in the world. Through exploration, wild nature gradually became a distinctive landscape where humans have their place. We believe that there is some hope for the future of human-nature coexistence.
Summary of bilateral results
Both partners the donor and benefiting organisation share these project outputs:- curricula for new intensive international learning activities- study materials on new virtual course on Moodle- developed competence of their staff and students (pedagogic, didactic and social skills –intercultural, communication and team-work).From the students and academicals internships, we learnt that Norway cares for sustainable development, social responsibility and ecology more intensively than the Czech Republic. The education on and in nature has got a very long tradition in Norway. From the original concept of environmental education in the narrower sense, more space began to be devoted to a more broadly conceived education for sustainable development in school curricula from kindergarten to secondary school. The purpose is not only to build a relationship between nature and children and young people, but also to appropriately apply the acquired knowledge to the classroom and connect it with the real world. Czech outgoing students had the opportunity to learn these principles. They also had the opportunity to talk with NMBU students, establish contacts and compare student life at the NMBU and the CZU in Prague, including the cultural and social differences of these 2 countries. At the NMBU, the Czech academics got acquainted with the university educational strategy, from which they could also take inspiration for their home university environment.Both partners decided to sign a new bilateral agreement within the programme Erasmus+ and plan to organise 7-days-long summer schools in Prague and Oslo every academic year.